Moral science has two halves. There are the implications of thinking straight about fact and value (ideal theory) and there are the implications of not thinking straight. Ideal theory is the foundation, error theory the daily battle.

Saturday, September 01, 2012

Permission-request for eco-fraud professor to say whether he contacted me

Professor Lewandowsky’s recently-accepted article likening global warming skeptics to moon-landing deniers says that he asked skeptical bloggers to post his climate survey and that five of these skeptics turned him down, but skeptical bloggers have been consulting each other about these claims and it seems that none were actually contacted by Lewandowsky. The most prominent skeptic bloggers all deny that they were contacted by him and a fortiori that they sent him any reply. Neither have any lower profile skeptic bloggers (like myself), reported being contacted.

It would seem that you have a case of academic misconduct on your hands, with fraudulent survey claims put forward in an attempt to malign political opponents. Truly bad behavior, not just academic fraud, but something approaching slander. I understand that you are in charge of academic misconduct investigations at UWA. Please proceed accordingly.

Sincerely,

Alec Rawls
Palo Alto, California

Lewandowsky is refusing to say who he supposedly contacted and who supposedly replied on the grounds that he is protecting these people's privacy so Lucia Liljegren is collecting links from climate bloggers who are are giving Professor Lewandowsky permission to publicize any correspondence with them. Many are also requesting that he do so, as I now publicly request.

I blog about climate at my own Error Theory blog and occasionally at the higher profile Watts Up With That. Possibly you tried to contact me with a request to do a post on your climate survey? I did not see any such request and did not reply to any such request but if you did send me such a request I not only give you permission to publicize this information (and any response you think you got from me), but I request that you do so.

About Me

Here is a short bio I sent to press people covering the Flight 93 memorial debacle. My training is as an economist. I was in the PhD program in economics at Stanford until my research led me more towards moral theory and constitutional law, at which point I dropped the program and started working on my own. I was writing a book on republicanism (the system of liberty under law) for World Ahead Publishing when I discovered that the Flight 93 memorial was going to be a terrorist memorial mosque. World Ahead agreed to first publish my book about this rehijacking of Flight 93 (Crescent of Betrayal, temporarily available for free download at CrescentOfBetrayal.com). This is not my first venture into journalism. Over the years I have been a writer, opinions editor, and advisor for Stanford’s conservative campus newspaper The Stanford Review, and am currently on the Review’s board of directors.